AWS Lambda is a serverless compute service that automatically manages the compute fleet and scales based on demand. It's best used for short-lived, event-driven tasks. Below are typical use cases where Lambda excels.
Real-time file processing (e.g., image resizing or video transcoding after upload to S3)
Data transformation pipelines (e.g., ETL jobs triggered by data uploads or stream updates)
Webhooks and APIs (e.g., responding to HTTP requests via API Gateway)
Automation of cloud tasks (e.g., cleaning up unused resources, backup tasks)
Real-time stream processing (e.g., processing records from Kinesis or DynamoDB Streams)
Chatbot or voice assistant backend logic (e.g., Amazon Lex or Alexa)
Scheduled tasks and cron jobs (e.g., running a function every night)
Authentication triggers (e.g., post-login hooks in Cognito)
IoT data processing (e.g., processing sensor data from IoT Core)